Google’s acquisition of Motorola on hold – for now

The EU regulator has called time (temporarily) on Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility.

Regulators in the European Union temporarily stopped the review on December 6th, requesting more information about the deal.

According to Amelia Torres, spokesperson for the European Commission, the review will continue after: ‘certain documents that are essential to its evaluation of the transaction.’

Google’s spokesperson Al Verney says the information request is: ‘routine….. We’re confident the commission will conclude that this acquisition is good for competition and we’ll be working closely and cooperatively with them as they continue their review.”

The short-term consequence of this is that Google’s acquisition of Motorola will be put back until at least 2012.

Motorola’s proposed acquisition by Google for $12.5bn has been one of the biggest stories of 2012, with interest in whether Motorola would be given preferential treatment at the expense of other Android partners HTC and Samsung.

In addition Larry Page said: “anti-competitive patent attacks on Android” stating that “Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.”

Will this be a temporary blip? We’ll bring you more news when we get it